'Free Spirit': A childhood of adventure, danger

Safran is an attorney known for his pro-bono work to free a woman accused of the murder of her abusive boyfriend.

Safran is an attorney known for his pro-bono work to free a woman accused of the murder of her abusive boyfriend.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

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Safran is an attorney known for his pro-bono work to free a woman accused of the murder of her abusive boyfriend.

Safran is an attorney known for his pro-bono work to free a woman accused of the murder of her abusive boyfriend.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

'Free Spirit': A childhood of adventure, danger

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Everyone has a few crazy family stories from childhood, but Oakland attorney Joshua Safran could fill a book.

So he did.

His new memoir, "Free Spirit," begins at full throttle: When he was 10, his mother turns around from the passenger seat and screams to him to jump out of the hurtling Chevy as her drunk and paranoid boyfriend swerves up a rain-slicked mountain road.

In a wild ride of a childhood, Safran is kept out of school to hitchhike across the American West with his political revolutionary mother, in her idealistic search for counterculture utopia. Living off the grid means growing up in vans, communes, buses, shacks, tents and, at the lowest point, a lean-to on a forest stump without water, electricity or a toilet.

Written in a style that reviewers are comparing to the dry wit of David Sedaris, some of Safran's memories are sadly funny, like the time his mom's freeloader boyfriend taught him how to slip into freshly vacated diner booths and gobble the leftovers before the waitress noticed the switcheroo.

Or the time his mother exercised his psychic energy in preparation for his future as a warlock, so he would fit in with their housemates, self-described witches who assisted his home birth in a Haight-Ashbury commune in 1975.

Ultimate freedom was the upside of his unusual childhood, but the downside was a life largely unsupervised, and always one step away from danger.

"Every day was an adventure - just unfold the map and point to a place to go, there was something magical and cool about that for an 8-year-old, but it was also scary," said Safran, who now lives in the "straight world," litigating land use issues for the Port of Oakland, sharing a home with his wife and three daughters, 10, 8, and 6.

"Mom and I lived in the woods, and we didn't trap animals or anything, we weren't survivalists. We were terrible at living in the woods, actually, we just did it for a long time."

Safran suffers through freezing winters, frequent hunger, long periods left in the company of strangers, and constant wandering from place to place, including a Rainbow Gathering where he pilfered marijuana-smoke-filled tents for food and blankets.

Domestic abuse

But the biggest threat came in the form of an alcoholic, self-proclaimed revolutionary from El Salvador who enchants and marries his mother, then quickly sets into a routine of binge drinking, battering, repenting and loving that left a terrified Safran crying to the sound of his mother's beatings.

"My wife and my friends had been encouraging me to write my story, but I'd always been too ashamed and embarrassed that I hadn't better protected my mom," Safran said.

His stepfather wraps several cars - some of them stolen - around trees on mountain roads after drinking, gets fired from job after job, and routinely accuses Safran's mother of cheating on him. She justifies his rages as post-traumatic stress from his heroic years being tortured by U.S.-backed death squads in Central America - stories that later turn out to be fabrications drawn from movie scenes.

Three years into the abuse, when Safran is 12, he finally stands up to the man, ordering him out of the house. His stepfather leaves, but not after punching Safran in the mouth first.

Mother and son recover at another commune, in Washington at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, where Safran enrolls in school and earns a full scholarship to Oberlin College in Ohio. He then studies Judaism and law in Israel for a year, and then returns for a law degree at UC Berkeley.

Safran interviewed his mother once a week while writing the book, but she hasn't yet read it. During their interviews, they each became more aware of what the other was going through, and she apologized, saying her relationship co-dependency was akin to an illness. His mother eventually received an inheritance and started making money by buying land, having homes built and living in them as they were being constructed, then selling them to buy more land. She now lives in the Bay Area.

Although Safran thought he'd left the dark years of his childhood far behind, the imprint lingered, and became the reason that he and another attorney in 2002 decided to defend a California woman imprisoned for alleged involvement in the murder of a boyfriend who prostituted her, beat her with a whip and molested her children.

Using a new California law at the time that allowed battered women in prison to reopen their legal cases, Safran spent seven years working to release Debbie Peagler from a 27-year sentence, using proof of perjured evidence, long-lost witnesses and new testimony from the actual killers.

Going public

The legal battle was captured in an award-winning documentary aired on the Oprah Network, "Crime After Crime." In the final scene, Safran breaks down in sobs when he learns that Peagler was finally set free.

"Only in writing this book did I discover that I also took Deborah's case ... to prove to my 10-year-old self that I finally had the strength and the courage to protect someone from abuse," Safran writes in the epilogue to "Free Spirit."

Before she died of lung cancer a year after her release, Peagler encouraged Safran to tell his own story.

It was Safran, after all, she pointed out, who had told her to be brave and go public for "Crime After Crime."

"She was right," Safran said. "I first told a few childhood stories onstage through a group in Oakland called the Men's Story Project. The reaction was profound. Two men came up to me afterward and admitted they were wrong and they needed to get help."

Now, Safran is working with the same producer/director from "Crime After Crime," Yoav Potash, shooting scenes in the Bay Area for a film version of "Free Spirit."

He and his daughters are extras in the movie - free spirits at the Rainbow Gathering.

Only this time, he can leave the be-in at the end of the day for an actual house. A home where he takes hour-long showers, just because he can.